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“Married, on the 10th instant, by the Rev. Friar Laurence, at the residence of the bride’s uncle, Montague Capulet, Esq., Miss Adrienne Le Couvreur to Mr. Ralph Van Twiller, both of this city. No cards.”

“Free List suspended,” murmured De Peyster.

“It strikes me,” said Frank Livingstone, who had been ruffling the leaves of a magazine at the other end of the table, “that you fellows are in a great fever about Van Twiller.”

“So we are.”

“Well, he has simply gone out of town.”

“Where?”

“Up to the old homestead on the Hudson.”

“It’s an odd time of year for a fellow to go into the country.”

“He has gone to visit his mother,” said Livingstone.

“In February?”

“I did n’t know, Delaney, that there was any statute in force prohibiting a man from visiting his mother in February if he wants to.”

Delaney made some light remark about the pleasure of communing with Nature with a cold in her head, and the topic was dropped.

Livingstone was hand in glove with Van Twilier, and if any man shared his confidence it was Livingstone. He was aware of the gossip and speculation that had been rife in the club, but he either was not at liberty or did not think it worth while to relieve our curiosity. In the course of a week or two it was reported that Van Twiller was going to Europe; and go he did. A dozen of us went down to the Scythia to see him off. It was refreshing to have something as positive as the fact that Van Twiller had sailed.

II.

Shortly after Van Twiller’s departure the whole thing came out. Whether Livingstone found the secret too heavy a burden, or whether it transpired through some indiscretion on the part of Mrs. Vanrensselaer Vanzandt Van Twiller, I cannot say; but one evening the entire story was in the possession of the club.

Van Twiller had actually been very deeply interested–not in an actress, for the legitimate drama was not her humble walk in life, but–in Mademoiselle Olympe Zabriski, whose really perilous feats on the trapeze had astonished New York the year before, though they had failed to attract Delaney and me the night we wandered into the up-town theatre on the trail of Van Twiller’s mystery.

That a man like Van Twiller should be fascinated even for an instant by a common circus-girl seems incredible; but it is always the incredible thing that happens. Besides, Mademoiselle Olympe was not a common circus-girl; she was a most daring and startling gymnaste, with a beauty and a grace of movement that gave to her audacious performance almost an air of prudery. Watching her wondrous dexterity and pliant strength, both exercised without apparent effort, it seemed the most natural proceeding in the world that she should do those unpardonable things. She had a way of melting from one graceful posture into another, like the dissolving figures thrown from a stereopticon. She was a lithe, radiant shape out of the Grecian mythology, now poised up there above the gaslights, and now gleaming through the air like a slender gilt arrow.

I am describing Mademoiselle Olympe as she appeared to Van Twiller on the first occasion when he strolled into the theatre where she was performing. To me she was a girl of eighteen or twenty years of age (maybe she was much older, for pearl-powder and distance keep these people perpetually young), slightly but exquisitely built, with sinews of silver wire; rather pretty, perhaps, after a manner, but showing plainly the effects of the exhaustive drafts she was making on her physical vitality. Now, Van Twiller was an enthusiast on the subject of calisthenics. “If I had a daughter,” Van Twiller used to say, “I would n’t send her to a boarding-school, or a nunnery; I ‘d send her to a gymnasium for the first five years. Our American women have no physique. They are lilies, pallid, pretty–and perishable. You marry an American woman, and what do you marry? A headache. Look at English girls. They are at least roses, and last the season through.” Walking home from the theatre that first night, it flitted through Van Twiller’s mind that if he could give this girl’s set of nerves and muscles to any one of the two hundred high-bred women he knew, he would marry her on the spot and worship her forever.